I am heading to Romania now to look at how a country tries to eradicate corruption — or not.  Does corruption damage or does it oil wheels that need to be turned?

That’s British government-speak for a £12 billion (US$20 billion) program to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mails and telephone records of everyone in Britain — according to the Sunday Times. Technology known as ‘deep inspection packs’ acting like airplane black boxes will be placed with Internet Service Providers and mobile (cell) phone companies. 

In Chapter 47 in Security Breach, Kat Polinski breaks into the data base at Media Axis which stores every e-mail, phone call….. Need I go on.   

But if you want to know more of how it will work go to:-
 

According to Dennis Sewell in Britain’s Spectator magazine, the current financial turmoil is not the fault of Wall Street and greedy bankers,.  The banks were apparently bullied into lowering their lending standards by left-wing idealists in the Clinton administration in the mid-nineties intent on equal opportunities at any cost and relaxing lending criteria.

Then why have the banks not been pointing this out more publicly and have the lending criteria now been tightened?

The Project Peace treaty that Kat investigates is composed of worrying trends that we see today:  the post Nine Eleven tightening of security, imprisonment without trial; power in the hands of international business consortia who have governments in their pockets; and a growing underclass whose opinion is forged through clever manipulation of the media.
 

In Security Breach, the world is preparing for the signing of Project Peace, a treaty between Russia, China and the

When Kat gets to London she finds herself face-to-face with the most security-intense city in the world, a quasi-police state and daily life of high-tech surveillance that George Orwell could not have conceived when he wrote 1984.

A colleague, who is a veteran of Iraq, returned from reporting the Georgian conflict saying how comforting it was approaching a Russian military checkpoint knowing youwon’t get shot if you make a mistake — unlike the lethal force authorised at the US checkpoints in Iraq.¼/p>

In Chapter Eleven, Kat meets a tall, swaying woman, with a stutter and limp. It’s a fleeting introduction to one Security Breach’s most compelling characters. The woman is Liz Luxton and she has cerebral palsy. As medical science improves, more of us will have a friend or loved one with cerebral palsy.  Kat needs skills that Liz has learned despite her condition. She also needs Liz’s no nonsense character to get her through the fog, and when she listens to the sharp exchanges between Liz and her protective brother, Mike, she witnesses a new, unfamiliar side of humanity and love. There’s no way Liz is a victim. Enjoy her. She’s very special.

Bronwen Maddox on page 56 of her deeply impressive book In Defence of America draws on a truth, unpalateable to so many in both Europe and the developing world.

They want the best of it, she writes — the scientific discovery, the technological innovation, the anti-cancer drugs. Quite a few want American music and movies, too; those products were not thrust on foreign audiences against their will. But they criticise or reject the system that produced them.

China may buy as much as 49 per cent of Morgan Stanley. Watch what else it snaps up in the Wall Street disaster sale and how it uses it.